Northwest Mountains

You could trigger an avalanche in recently wind-drifted snow.  Isolated terrain features may hold sensitive drifts from recent west to northwest winds.  A small chance remains for you to trigger an avalanche deep in the snowpack.  The most suspect terrain for a deep failing avalanche may be rocky and/or shallow from wind erosion.  You can reduce the chances of an avalanche by steering around recent wind drifts and selecting terrain with deep, uniform coverage greater than 6 feet.  

Monday through Wednesday this week delivered an impressive storm with snow totals rangering from 2 to 4 feet.  On Wednesday, an increase in west-to-northwest winds redistributed snow to leeward terrain.  A few recent storm snow avalanches were documented around the area on drifted terrain (Ruby Peak, Northwest Mountains ob); you can look at images in the gallery below.  Carefully read snow surface textures looking for locations where the wind deposited snow recently and steer around stiffer, pillowy-looking drifts.  Recent drifts are not expected to be very sensitive to the weight of a person, but in isolated places, might be.

Weak layers near the bottom of the snowpack still require your attention and management to avoid triggering a very dangerous avalanche.  In the Northwest Mountains, weak layers are deep but some shallow terrain leaves the possibility open.  Consider avoiding terrain that is very rocky or full of cliff bands, wind-eroded slopes that have shallower snow depths than surrounding terrain, and slopes with 5 feet or less of snowpack depth.  Overall, avalanches failing on deep weak layers are trending towards 'unlikely' for snow-favored areas around Crested Butte.  Management techniques in the Southeast Mountains require a different tactic as snowpack depths are generally shallower than in the Northwest Mountains.  This observation from Reno Divide may help illustrate that areas with a shallower snowpack contain more trigger points and thus a greater chance of releasing a dangerous avalanche.  Explosive control work, at our local ski area, continues to produce avalanche activity on basal weak layers; this is clear evidence that terrain with shallower depths harbor the potential to fail near the bottom of the snowpack.  There simply is more terrain with snowpack depths near or below 5 feet in the Southeast Mountains.  Carefully select your terrain in the Southeast Mountains and consider the consequences of being wrong.  Choosing smaller slopes with clean runouts and keeping slope angles less than 35 degrees (not connected to steeper terrain) will help you reduce consequences if you are wrong.

The next week does not appear to have a major loading event and it seems like the snowpack will finally get a chance to adjust to the current load.  Each day without a loading event will result in a slow decrease in the likelihood of triggering an avalanche deep in the snowpack.  If you find yourself uncertain, then simply make more conservative terrain choices (slopes 30 degrees or less) knowing that avalanche conditions will slowly improve as time increases from the last loading event.